Noise reduction mechanisms of an open-cell metal-foam trailing edge

Open-cell porous materials have been reported as a promising concept for mitigating turbulent boundary-layer trailing-edge noise. This manuscript examines the aeroacoustics of a porous trailing edge to study its noise reduction mechanisms. Numerical investigations have been carried out for a NACA 0018 aerofoil with three different types of trailing edge: a baseline solid trailing edge, a fully porous trailing edge and a blocked-porous variant in which a solid core is added at the symmetry plane. The latter prevents flow interaction between the two sides of the aerofoil. Flow-field solutions are obtained by solving the explicit, transient and compressible lattice-Boltzmann equation, while the Ffowcs-Williams and Hawkings acoustic analogy has been used to compute far-field noise. The porous material is modelled using an equivalent fluid region governed by Darcy's law, in which the properties of a Ni-Cr-Al open-cell metal foam are applied. The simulation results are validated against reference data from experiments. The regular porous trailing edge reduces noise substantially, particularly at low frequency, whereas the blocked variant retains similar noise characteristics as the solid one. By employing a beamforming technique, the dominant source is found at the trailing edge for the solid and blocked trailing edges, while for the fully porous one, the dominant source is located near the solid-porous junction. The analysis of the scattered sound suggests that the permeability of the porous trailing edge allows for acoustic scattering along the porous medium surface that promotes destructive interference, and in turn, attenuates far-field noise intensity. The spectra and spanwise coherence of surface pressure fluctuations at the trailing edge are hardly affected by the presence of the porous material, which are found to be insufficient to justify the noise reduction. The flow field inside the porous medium is also examined to explain the differences between the fully porous and blocked-porous trailing edges. While the mean velocity components are similar for both, substantial difference is found for the velocity fluctuations. The impedance of the porous medium is computed as the ratio of velocity and pressure fluctuations. Unlike the blocked variant, the impedance in the fully porous trailing edge gradually decreases along the downstream direction, which leads to the distributed noise scattering along the porous medium surface. Additionally, the scattering efficiency at the actual trailing edge location is reduced due to the smaller impedance discontinuity.